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Welcome to Strat-O-Matic Online's New Home at Strat-O-Matic.com!
Welcome to our new home at Strat-O-Matic.com! Resuming gameplay 'The playing of league games resumed on Tuesday night, June 26.' Leagues games resumed on Tuesday night according to our plan, and the results are now available to your teams. While we had testers double-check everything before we posted the results, we're still exercising caution as we proceed. Therefore, in the unlikely event that any major issues are discovered that compromise the validity of a large portion of leagues, we're prepared to consider a mass rollback and re-play. But again, we don't expect to have to resort to that. 'Open issues with stats displays' We're aware of the following issues concerning some of the stats displays, and will be working to resolve them very soon. All of these were known during testing, and we regret that they're not resolved at this time, but we felt that they alone should not be delaying the resumption of gameplay any further. *Team Fielding tab - X-chance displays for Primary Positions. The game engine isn't writing this data out yet. *Team Misc. tab - Ballpark FX rolls. These figures are close to accurate, but testing has shown them not to be fully so. A few (a small minority of) plays are not being recorded perfectly. *League Standings (Expanded) - W/L record in extra-inning games. The game engine is now explicitly writing out the number of innings each game lasts (good), but we haven't yet back-populated older game results with their inning lengths, so the extra-inning records are currently only counting from this point forward (bad). 'Plan for Wednesday night's games (and for the time being)' To continue being cautious, we'll be executing the same plan to run games each night for the time being, at least until we're confident in the process being fully automatable and stable. The roster/settings freeze deadline is at 10pm ET as usual. Shortly after 10pm ET, our database will be taken offline so that we can prepare it for gameplay, and access to your teams will be unavailable starting at that time. We'll be running the games behind the scenes, and then we'll be taking our time to sanity check the results with our testers before you see any of it. Again, we expect things to go smoothly from now on, but I hope you can understand that it makes sense to take things slowly and cautiously for the time being to make sure we get back on the right track. 'Game date schedule details' The last games that were played on the old SportingNews.com site were on Thursday night, June 7. Leagues that were scheduled to play games on Friday night, June 8, resumed play on Tuesday night, June 26. Preseason leagues who had their Opening Nights originally scheduled on or before Monday, June 25, started their seasons on Tuesday night, June 26. Getting access to your existing SOM Online teams If you've been playing SOM Online at its old home at SportingNews.com, then you were instructed to register a new user account at Strat-O-Matic.com using the same email address that your SportingNews.com account was registered under. If you did that correctly, your teams are now associated with that new Strat-O-Matic.com account. You may now log in to your new Strat-O-Matic.com account. If you happen to be logged in already, please log out, and then log back in. After that, you should be able to go to http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com and see your active teams on the left side of the page, underneath the big front page graphic. From then on, you may go straight to http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com whenever you want to play the game. If you're having trouble finding your teams or logging in If you didn't get the chance to register a Strat-O-Matic.com user account before the move, or you made a mistake and your email address didn't exactly match... that's cool, brother! We made an account for you. This is a page where you can use your old SportingNews.com username and password to find out the username of the Strat-O-Matic.com account where you'll find your teams: http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/member/snauth ' If you've tried everything on that page and you still can't find your teams, please email us at onlinegamesupport@strat-o-matic.com and we'll help you out. Please give a very specific, detailed description of your problem, with exactly what you see and what's happening. Open issues Site functionality is fairly complete, though as with all new site launches, please pardon our dust, as they say. You may do all the things you're used to doing with your teams to prepare for the first new night of games on Friday; you may purchase new team credits by clicking the "Start a New Team!" button on the upper right of the game site, create new teams and join new leagues. There are a few things that are not quite available just yet, including a few things I didn't realize you'd miss so much about the old site :). Please be patient as I try to assist every customer's individual issues and accommodate everyone's requests, and understand that I'm going to try to get everything in due time. *The 'old forums at SportingNews.com are still up, but will remain unlinked on the new site because new users are unable to post to them. If you are a former SportingNews.com member, you'd still use your old login to post there. *"Frenzies" are not available yet. *'Unclaimed prize credits / credit inquiries in general'. All unused team credits did transfer over, but if you had unclaimed prizes from playoff teams that you had not converted into credits, we're still working on that. We do have good records and a paper trail. So please be patient and please hold off on emailing us until we're done with this next part of the transfer. *You may not change your "Hide Results" settings for your teams just yet. If you had that setting on for any of your teams at the time of the move, their results will still be hidden as expected; you'll just be "stuck" that way for a very short while. *The old lineup interface where your bench was on the left, your lineup was on the right, and you clicked to bring guys over and move them up and down. I underestimated how many people still used it because it doesn't support the Lineup Depth Chart. I am aware that it was more compatible with mobile devices. I'll work on a solution that's more similar to the old interface, but please learn to use the new interface in the meantime. *'Mobile device (incl. iPad)' compatibility. While it's true that the new site works a lot better on mobile devices in general, there are a few key interfaces that rely on drag-and-drop functionality, which is not quite as compatible with touchscreens. Eventually I'll work to improve that. *The unread mail icon on the Your Teams page. I'll get to that soon. *'Last 10 games' on player card popups isn't available yet. I intend to replace it with a full log of each player's season! *'Line scores' (inning by inning scoring) on game boxscores is currently missing, because they will be replaced with a more proper HTML-based display when new games are played, which can be shown on all other parts of the site. *'Access to your old teams, and relatedly, the old Manager Ratings'. One of the biggest culprits involved in any of our database issues during our tenure here at SportingNews.com was the sheer amount of your data that we've been keeping around. 10+ years, hundreds of thousands of teams, hundreds of millions of player stat records. A tiny percentage of which is being accessed by you at a given time, but still we've been consuming crazy expensive resources keeping it in one giant database which runs more slowly as you guys generate more data, and is tough to maintain and troubleshoot when there are problems. Well we're going to be smarter from now on; we'll be archiving your older teams into a separate database, which will allow us to keep the main database lean and mean with your active teams. Don't worry, we still intend to have your archived teams accessible to you going forward, but it might take just a little time to set up smoothly and properly. Resolved issues *On the Default Lineups page, the correct fielding rating is now being shown for each player based on the position he's playing in the lineup. *'Send a Trade Offer to this team' link has been added to the team pages of the other teams in your league. *Saving your Team Strategy for new teams created after the transition is now working. *'Roster minimum of 24 players' is now correctly being enforced. *'Blown saves' are now showing up correctly on the "Simulated stats" tab of Your Team. *'Player searches' by Balance L are now working. Further updates and news Will be posted here and/or at the new site in the coming days. Welcome! Bernie H. Strat-O-Matic.com onlinegamesupport@strat-o-matic.com